Trade Time and the Calculus of Risk in Early Pacific Travel Wri

Scholar Commons2011 Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in Early Pacific Travel Writing Michelle Burnham Santa Clara University, mburnham@scu.edu Follow this and additional works at: h

Scholar Commons

2011

Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in Early

Pacific Travel Writing

Michelle Burnham

Santa Clara University, mburnham@scu.edu

Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/engl

Part of the English Language and Literature Commons , and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons

Copyright © 2011 by the University of North Carolina Press Used by permission of the publisher www.uncpress.unc.edu

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Recommended Citation

Burnham, M (2011) Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in Early Pacific Travel Writing Early American Literature, 46(3), 425-447

Trade, Time, and the Calculus of Risk in

Early Pacific Travel Writing

In the 2005 Common-place issue on early America and the Pacific,

historians Edward Gray and Alan Taylor observe that the Atlantic studies

paradigm, which moves "beyond nations and states as the defining

sub-jects of historical understanding, turning instead to large scale processes"

is also particularly "useful for understanding Pacific history" since

"dis-ease, migration, trade, and war effected [sic] the Pacific in much the way

they effected [sic] the Atlantic." A similar transfer of the Atlantic world

model to the Pacific informs David Igler's insistence that, like the

Atlan-tic, the Pacific world was "international before it became national."1 Igler

notes that most scholarship on the Pacific has instead relied, however, on a

national framework, leaving "too little of this work cast in a

compara-tive, transnational, or transoceanic mold" (par 5) As this critique suggests,

it is time to consider not just the exchanges and processes within each of

these oceanic worlds but between them as well In this essay, I examine late

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Pacific travel writing in precisely

such a transoceanic context

Many of the earliest European voyages into the Pacific were motivated

by a desire to find the so-called Northwest Passage that was believed to

connect the Atlantic with the Pacific through a series of waterways in the

upper reaches of the North American continent Pacific coast entrances to

such a passage were reported by Juan de Fuca and Bartholomew de Fonte

and were eagerly sought after- with varying degrees of eagerness and

skep-ticism- by explorers from Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake to James

Cook and George Vancouver? The myth of the Northwest Passage endured

despite growing evidence against its existence because its discovery would

have provided European ships with a quicker and less contested route to

Asia and its desirable trade goods But though such a passage was never

found, the many voyages that set out either to prove or disprove its

exis-tence did in fact connect the two oceans- not through the geography of a

Northwest Passage but through commerce, politics, and writing Published accounts of these voyages represent a fascinating and substantial trans-national archive that as yet has barely been touched by early American lit-erary scholars.3 My claim here is not that these texts should be considered

in some special way American, but rather that the study of early American literature needs to include these transnational texts and to accommodate the pressures they apply to the literary and cultural histories of the Revo-lutionary and early national periods that currently inform our discipline

In the process, the transoceanic and intercontinental sweep of this early Pacific material might also offer one way to bring the two models of trans-atlantic and hemispheric early American studies into greater dialogue with each other.4

This essay begins with a brief transnational survey of Pacific travel ing between approximately 1760 and 1820, a period of international com-petition for scientific discovery and commercial profit that provided the context for these voyages and the publication of narratives about them

writ-I pay particular attention to the subgenre of the state-sponsored Pacific travel narrative and examine the dynamics of trade and time embedded within its textual and narratological features The often enormous returns

of profit and knowledge from these voyages were made possible only by their lengthy duration, for it took anywhere from three to six years to travel through the Atlantic, past Cape Horn, and across and around the Pacific

on voyages seeking undiscovered lands, resources, and trade goods As a result, the sense of expectation and anticipation generated by these voy-ages and texts depended on considerable patience and prolongation But that same temporal prolongation also worked to mask or minimize the violence that accompanied such returns, including the violent transoce-anic movement of goods (such as fur, silk, and silver) and of bodies (espe-cially the indigenous, women, and sailors) As I'll argue, the narrative dy-namics of this calculative logic relies on a new understanding of numbers and risk that subsumed violence and loss within the mechanics of long-run calculations

PACIFIC TRAVEL AND PACIFIC TRAVEL WRITING

European ties to the Pacific were established at least as early as the tuguese settlement on the Chinese island of Macao in 1557, which linked

Por-Portugal through a lucrative regular trade in silks, silver, and spices with

China, Japan, India, and the Moluccas (or Spice Islands) The following

de-cade, Spain established a regular route between the Atlantic and the Pacific

when it conquered the Philippines and established the galleon trade in

1565, a trade in which several ships left Acapulco every year with

Mexi-can silver to exchange in Manila for popular Asian trade goods.5 Spices,

porcelain, and silk were in turn transported back to Acapulco, through the

Caribbean, and across the Atlantic into Spain At the end of that century,

the Dutch launched a series of mercantile voyages into the Pacific,

estab-lishing a trading post at Batavia in Java (now Jakarta in Indonesia) and

in-augurating a vigorous spice trade in the East Indies The Dutch extended

their presence to the South Pacific in the seventeenth century with Abel

Tasman's voyages to Van Diemen's Land (or Tasmania) and New Zealand

and, early in the eighteenth century, with Jacob Roggeveen's expedition in

search of the Australian continent

The historian J C Beaglehole has categorized the sixteenth century in

the Pacific as Spanish, the seventeenth century as Dutch, and the

eigh-teenth century as French and English (3-4) But this neat taxonomy

over-looks the more complex internationalism of the region, perhaps especially

by the second half of the eighteenth century, which saw an explosion in

Pacific travel, trade, and exploration by the Russians, the Spanish, the

En-glish, the French, and the Americans- each of whom not only made

regu-lar contact with each other but with an astonishing array of Pacific peoples

and lands, from the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia to the trade

ports of Macao and Canton in China, from the coasts of Alaska and

Cali-fornia to the Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea, Australia, and

numer-ous Polynesian island systems including Tahiti, Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, and

the Marianas Much of this late eighteenth-century activity in the Pacific

was launched when Russian fur trading expeditions began moving across

the Bering Sea to the Aleutian and Kodiak islands in the 1740s As these

voyages extended further east and south along the northwest American

coastline in pursuit of sea otter furs, the Spanish began to grow fearful of

possible Russian encroachments on their territory In response, Spain sent

the Portola expedition by land into Alta California in 1769, establishing an

extensive mission system and also envisioning Monterey as a possible port

for Asian trade By the end of that century, Spain had also sent the De Anza

settlement expedition north by land to Monterey and San Francisco, and

expeditions by sea led by Francisco Mourelle and Juan de la Bodega and by Allesandro Malaspina.6

As the Spanish were responding to the Russian presence along the North American coastline in the 176os, both the English and the French were sponsoring ambitious voyages of discovery to the Pacific France entered the Pacific with Louis de Bougainville's circumnavigation of the globe in 1766, while the English sent no fewer than three expeditions dur-ing that same decade- by John Byron in 1764, by Samuel Wallis and Philip Carteret in 1766, and by Cook in 1768 These voyages were followed up

by two more expeditions by Cook in the 1770s, by the Frenchman Fran<;ois de Galaup de Laperouse's circumnavigation in the 178os, and by Vancouver's English voyage in the 1790s By the late 1780s and through-out several subsequent decades, the Pacific was also traversed by numer-ous British, American, French, and Russian commercial voyages seeking profits from the lucrative China trade as well as from sealing and whaling voyages During the late eighteenth century, then, a multinational array of goods and bodies moved with some regularity around the Pacific Ocean, its American and Asian coastlines, and Polynesia But these Pacific trade routes were themselves situated within transoceanic maritime trade net-works that linked the Pacific with the Atlantic through the exchange of European finished goods such as cookware, clothing, and firearms for Chi-nese teas, silks, and porcelains, primarily by way of sea otter pelts trapped and traded on the American northwest coast

Jean-All of these voyages, of course, also generated a considerable amount

of writing But if the Pacific has been neglected by historians of early America, as Gray and Taylor note, it has been even more neglected by scholars working in early American literary studies This neglect is in spite

of the fact that this international explosion in Pacific travel was panied by an equally international print explosion in Pacific travel writ-ing In the following brief review of the kinds of texts that made up this quite popular late eighteenth-century genre, I focus in particular on texts that circulated in English translation or that were originally published

accom-in English The most domaccom-inant subgenre withaccom-in Pacific travel writaccom-ing of the period were narratives of the large state-sponsored European expe-ditions and the collections of earlier international voyages that motivated and guided them The state-sponsored Pacific expeditions were, in fact, preceded and likely inspired by Charles de Brosses's historical collection

of Pacific travel narratives, first published in France in 1756 and a decade

later in English by John Callander Terra Australis Cognita; or, Voyages to

the Terra Australis, or Southern Hemisphere, during the Sixteenth,

Seven-teenth, and Eighteenth Centuries collected into multiple volumes accounts

of several centuries of Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and English voyages

Callander's edition translated de Brosses's material into English, but it also

silently excised all mention of the book's original French editor and even

"substitut[ ed] England for France" (Engstrand 30) throughout the volume

As a result, it efficiently argued that the English nation was in the best

posi-tion "to advance the Knowledge of Geography and Navigaposi-tion" and hoped

that the book itself would help "to promote the Commercial Interests of

Great Britain, and extend her Naval Power" (Callander n.p.) Callander's

appropriative edition appears to have launched an English boom in Pacific

travel and Pacific travel writing that lasted through the remainder of the

eighteenth century and into the beginning of the nineteenth century

Numerous travel compilations followed Callander's translation,

in-cluding two volumes of early Spanish and Dutch Pacific voyages edited

by Alexander Dalrymple and published in 1770-71; John Hawkesworth's

Cook; William Coxe's Account of the Russian Discoveries between Asia and

America, published in 1780 and in a revised and updated edition in 1787;

George William Anderson's 1784 A New, Authentic, and Complete

Col-lection of Voyages round the World, which collected English

eighteenth-century Pacific voyages; Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, and Samuel

Johnson's The World Displayed; or, A Curious Collection of Voyages and

Travels, Selected and Compiled from the Writers of all nations, published in

a Philadelphia edition in 1795; and James Burney's A Chronological History

of the Discoveries in the South Sea or Pacific Ocean, published in five

enor-mous volumes between 1803 and 1817 There were also continued

transla-tions of recent Pacific travel narratives into English during these decades;

for example, Bougainville's voyage was published in London in 1772, the

Spanish voyage of Mourelle and Bodega in 1781, and Laperouse's voyage

around the world in 1798 Pacific travel accounts were also often abridged,

combined into collections, and reprinted along with other historical and

contemporary Pacific voyages News of these voyages and reviews of and

excerpts from these travel narratives also sometimes appeared in

Ameri-can periodicals during this period.7

Numerous lesser-known voyages and experiences in the including those by ship captains, castaways and captives, disgruntled or impoverished sailors, missionaries, and merchants-also made it into print during the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth: the Polish Count Maurice Benyowsky's ex-ploits in Siberia and the Pacific were published in 1790; James Colnett's Pacific whaling narrative in 1798; James Wilson's missionary voyage to the south Pacific in 1799; William Moulton's account of shipboard tyranny and William Broughton's exploration voyage both in 1804; John Jewitt's Nootka captivity narrative in 1807; John Turnbull's commercial voyage in 1810; David Porter's US expedition in 1815; shipwreck narratives by the Scots-man Archibald Campbell and the American Daniel Foss in 1816; the sailor Samuel Patterson's account of Fiji in 1817; and officer Amasa Delano's ac-count of his merchant ship voyages (the source for Melville's Benito Cereno)

Pacific-in 1818

· With the glaring exception of the three expeditions led by Captain James Cook, few of these accounts have received much in the way of schol-arly attention, and even fewer are available in modern editions Rather than make a case for any single one or a few of these texts, however, I read examples here of the particular subgenre of the state-sponsored voyage narrative in order to identify and contextualize some of its textual and nar-ratological features We might take John Callander's national appropria-tion of de Brasses's French collection as a model for the way in which these texts often replicated in print the intense international competition that characterized the voyages themselves, which sought to make claims to new scientific discoveries on the one hand and lay claims to considerable com-mercial profits on the other In fact, the goals of disinterested scientific knowledge and self-interested commercial gain were often intricately en-tangled with each other; in most cases, the state-sponsored circumnaviga-tions publicly announced goals of scientific discovery (such as tracking the transit of Venus, or locating the great southern continent, or charting new coastlines) while also secretly pursuing commercial goals (such as iden-tifying new trade goods, or locating sites for the establishment of trading posts, or competing in already established trade networks).8

Whatever the ostensible reasons for sailing into it from the Atlantic, the Pacific became synonymous with exceptionally long periods of time, with the experience of waiting many years to learn of or reap the results

of these endeavors These trips demanded enormous patience even while

they excited considerable expectation, since profit and discovery alike

de-pended on the prolonged duration of these very risky, and very promising,

voyages While most thinking about temporality in literary studies comes

from narratology and studies of the novel, I turn to the textualization of late eighteenth-century Pacific trade and travel to investigate a particular

mode of narrative temporality that-by combining patient duration with

impatient expectation-might be thought of as prolonged promise

Ac-counts of Pacific travel are characterized, I argue, by modes of

narrativiz-ing risk that reflect a new eighteenth-century conception of numbers and

time, and that work to conceal the violence and loss that often

character-ized these voyages

PROFIT AND PROLONGATION

The experience of Pacific travel repeatedly showed that there was no

profit without prolongation When Vitus Bering's 1741 expedition returned

to Russia, the results appeared disastrous: one ship had been lost entirely,

along with half of its men, and Bering himself died of illness on an

unin-habited island in the sea that now bears his name The returns from the

voyage included only some survivors, a reconstructed ship, and some pelts

from the sea otters they had consumed as food while stranded on islands

in the north Pacific When those pelts, however, later proved to be highly

profitable in the China market, Russian merchants began to outfit

sub-sequent expeditions in exclusive pursuit of sea otter fur along the islands

and coastlines of the American far northwest The past losses of Bering's

voyage became dwarfed by the prospect of future profits

Although the Russians extended and exploited this Pacific fur trade

over the subsequent decades, it was the travel narrative of James Cook's

third voyage that circulated news of its profitability to Western Europe

and the United States The publication of this travel narrative in 1784 has

long been associated with its description of Cook's death at the hands of Sandwich (or Hawaiian) Islanders But it may well have been another pas-

sage altogether that marked the narrative's central moment of narrative

engagement for late eighteenth -century readers- namely, the description

of the sailors' extraordinary profits by selling in China the sea otter skins

acquired from northwest coast natives In fact, while the account of Cook's

death- and the rather grisly descriptions of attempts to recover portions

of his cannibalized body for purposes of identification and burial- has taken on a mythic status in cultural memory, the account of income from the Asian fur trade took on an equally gripping and mythic dimension for eighteenth-century readers and speculators.9 Indeed, the spectacle of the violent murder and reported cannibalization of James Cook's body on

a beach in the Pacific really should be seen as circulating together with

the spectacle of immense profits made by some sailors and merchants on that voyage These paired images-of violence and profit, of cannibaliza-tion and accumulation-together illustrate the rotating cycle of exploita-tion and resistance that characterized the trade circuits that webbed across the Pacific and that also connected that ocean by commercial and political cords to the Atlantic But these paired images illustrate as well the strangely allied temporal attitudes of restless impatience with static endurance, of horrified engagement with abstract calculation

It was just after Cook's death in Hawaii that the Resolution (led after

Cook by Captain James King) arrived on the northwest coast of North America Like the Russians several decades earlier, the sailors discover that the furs possessed by the northwest coast natives "produce a high price; and the natives, from their mode of life, require few articles in return Our sailors brought a quantity of furs from the coast of America, and were both pleased and astonished on receiving such a quantity of silver for them from the [Russian] merchants" who were in the region (Cook 2: 319) The full significance of these furs, however, isn't realized until much later, when the men arrive in Asia In Canton, one sailor "disposed of his stock" of sea otter furs "for eight hundred dollars; and a few of the best skins, which were clear, and had been carefully preserved, produced a hundred and twenty dollars each." The sale of these "best skins" amounted to a return of ninety pounds on an investment of one shilling, or a profit of an astonishing 1,8oo percent (Gibson 22-23) Two sailors jumped ship altogether in the hopes of returning to the fur islands, "seduced by the hopes of acquiring a fortune" (Cook 2: 343), while those who remained on the ship had added to their ragged English clothing "the gayest silk and cottons that China could pro-duce" (2: 343)

Once this narrative appeared in print, the quick calculation of these numbers sent numerous men and ships on lengthy expeditions into the Pacific from Europe and the United States.10 Those ships sailing the long

route between Boston, the Northwest Coast, and Canton became known

for delayed desire, both economic and sexual These voyages were

iden-tified on the one hand with "lucrative profits" (Gibson 57), since the

re-turn on investment for these voyages could be anywhere from 200 to over

2,ooo percent, and on the other hand with "exotic stopovers" (Gibson 57),

primarily in Hawaii, where one visitor explained "[w]omen can be

con-sidered one of the commodities that these islands abundantly furnish to

visiting ships."11 George Vancouver, who arrived on the northwest coast in

the 1790s, encountered an assortment of English, American, and French

ships all "collecting the skins of sea-otter and other furs" (1: 408) He also

reported that the cost of sea otter skins was "at least an hundred per cent

dearer" (1: 348) than they had been on his last visit (when Vancouver was

a member of Cook's third expedition), and finds an English ship searching

for inland sources for fur since "the price of skins [was] so exorbitant on

the sea-coast" (1: 375).12 The speediness of the escalations and pleasures

de-scribed in these texts are in strange contrast to the utter sluggishness of the

journeys themselves, although it was precisely the combination of these

antithetical tempos that characterized both the content and the form of

these narratives These texts shared this temporal duality with the

calcula-tive logic of economic investment that motivated and underwrote the

voy-ages themselves and whose terms were especially magnified by the

enor-mous distances, durations, risks, and profits entailed by expeditions to the

Pacific

DURATION AND EXPECTATION

Temporal prolongation is materially evident in the most obvious

fea-ture shared by the vast majority of these Pacific travel books: their size By

eighteenth-century standards, Pacific travel collections tended to be large

tomes in every respect: they were bulky and heavy; they were wide, tall,

and thick; and they typically consisted of multiple volumes The collection

edited by Alexander Dalrymple, for instance, was made up of two such

heavy volumes The Hawkesworth collection took up three substantial

vol-umes, as did the Vancouver voyage alone, while Burney's history of Pacific

travel ran to five unwieldy volumes of about six hundred pages each The

size of these books is, of course, in some part a measure of the length and

breadth of the voyages themselves Their temporal duration was

empha-sized in titles that almost invariably ended with a serial listing of the years during which the journey was underway The title of Anderson's collec-

tion of English Pacific voyages, for example, begins A New, Authentic, and

Complete Collection of Voyages round the World, and concludes with And

Successively Performed in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771-1772, 1773, 1774, 1775-1776, 1777> 1778, 1779, 1780 The American edition of Cook's narrative

appeared as Captain Cook's Three Voyages to the Pacific Ocean: The First

Performed in the Years 1768, 1769, 1770 and 1771: The Second in 1772, 1773,

1774 and 1775: The third and Last in 1776, 1777> 1778, 1779 and 1780

Van-couver's travel narrative is called A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific

Ocean, and round the World Performed in the Years 1790, 1791, 1792,

1793, 1794, and 1795 The English edition of Bougainville's travels was titled

A Voyage round the World: Performed by Order of His Most Christian esty, in the Years 1766, 1767> 1768, and 1769, while Laperouse's read A Voy-

Maj-age round the World Performed in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787> 1788 This tence on sequentially listing each year of the voyage not only advertises but seems to perform the drawn-out temporality of the voyages themselves.13

insis-The sense conveyed by these titles of an extensive, almost tedious, duration is often replicated within the texts themselves, which are typi-cally organized as chronological records that take regular note of the ship's location, navigational direction, weather conditions, and nautical details Sometimes, these mundane details are in fact significant scientific findings that challenge, confirm, or complicate the results of earlier expeditions-such as revising information about the exact location of particular islands

or filling in the gaps of incomplete charts from earlier voyages On the one hand, then, these texts are characterized by a temporal duration marked most often by a rather tedious repetition and prolonged regularity, an ex-tended plodding onward in which, from a navigational standpoint, slow progress is being made but, from a narrative standpoint, nothing really happens On the other hand, these texts were both framed and punctuated

by a sense of anticipation, by an expectant sense of promise and urgency.14

They were framed by expectation because they were motivated by the

pur-suit of new knowledge and wealth, by the conviction that the nary costs of these voyages would result in even greater returns over the long term, and because international competition for such discoveries gave

extraordi-these voyages a sense of urgency And they were punctuated by expectation

because each successive encounter with a new landscape and new peoples

might yield profitable products and pliable partners for trade as well as

new information and discoveries

The pace of these narratives reflects this tension between dilation and

acceleration The narratologist Gerard Genette calculates narrative speed

according to the proportion of temporal duration to textual length, so that

the "speed of a narrative" is determined by "the relationship between a

duration (that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days,

months, and years) and a length (that of the text, measured in lines and in

pages)" (87-88) Because the navigational portions of Pacific travel

narra-tives typically cover a long expanse of time in a proportionally short

num-ber of pages, by Genette's structuralist metric they would be described

as fast or accelerated But although significant expanses of time may be

covered in these pages, the pace of the narrative from most readers' point

of view is experienced instead as profoundly slow Indeed, reader-oriented

narratology-which understands plot not as "fixed structures, but rather

a structuring operation peculiar to those messages that are developed

through temporal succession" (Brooks 10)-would describe these sections

of the text as slow or dilatory because they generate little or no sense of

ex-pectation or desire If for Peter Brooks "plot is, most aptly, a steam engine"

(44), the plot of the Pacific voyage narrative too often seems to drift at sea

like a preindustrial sail waiting for the wind to pick up

But signs of expectation and scenes of excitement in fact do interrupt the steady regularity of curt entries and dry navigational records, most

often at moments when the crew makes landfall, giving way to an in

ten-sification of detailed descriptions of the land, its produce, its inhabitants,

and the crew's interactions with them Such moments of encounter

typi-cally represent an inversion of the proportion of textual length to

tempo-ral duration that characterizes the navigational sections of the narrative

While only a few days or even hours may pass, the narration of that time

often takes up a large number of pages The narrative pace for readers

ac-cordingly speeds up, often quite dramatically, and plotting itself shifts from

a largely geographical activity (i.e., determining the shape of this coastline,

filling in the gaps of geographical knowledge on this map) to a narrative

dynamic (i.e., wondering what will happen next, now that the ship has

an-chored offshore, hoping to trade for food and profitable goods with the

natives, who are approaching in canoes, and may or may not be carrying

weapons) The routine navigational calculations that make the safe